This description relates generally to computer aided searching and more specifically to searching for instruction documents.
People often face unfamiliar tasks, and thus they need appropriate instructions for conducting them. Much effort has been made to cope with the problem. Including books for popular ‘how-to’ questions. Many online services for answering how-to questions are also available which can maintain a large collection of instruction documents and provide a search service on the collection.
However, none of them typically can cover all of the how-to questions in daily life. Thus, it could be helpful to have a system that helps automatically retrieve ‘instructions’ (i.e., documents of task guides) on the web (either Internet or intranet).